hg rebase abort fails: “unknown revision”

Question

Occasionally when performing a rebase using the MercurialEclipse plugin my repository gets thrown into an odd state. It will become stuck in a "rebasing" state, yet when I try to abort the rebase (e.g. "hg rebase -a") I get this error message:

abort: unknown revision 'xxxx'!

Where xxxx is a revision hash. Usually at this point I've abandoned all hope of performing the rebase -- I just want to get back to a happier time when my repository was not screwed up. So far my solution has been to nuke my project directory and clone it again. Is there a less drastic solution?

Answer 1

Just remove the .hg/rebasestate and your repo will work.

The patch described in this thread calls the internal function clearstate which just unlinks this file.

Answer 2

In situations similar to this, I usually do:

$ hg check
$ hg verify
$ hg up -C default

Instead of default, use whatever branch you're working on. This takes time, but so does re-cloning the repo.

It usually helps.